Manchester University Press creates a buzz of excitement with new platform launches

Thursday, 2 Aug 2018

On 30 July 2018 Manchester University Press launched two new platforms, manchesterhive and manchesteropenhive: the new homes for digital content from across the humanities and social sciences.

Building our own digital platforms brings many benefits, such as greater discoverability and accessibility for our award-winning scholarly publications, greater promotion and visibility for our authors and editors, and increased global readership.

The functions and tools available on the sites have been carefully developed through engagement with many stakeholders, including librarians, readers, authors and editors. We will continue to enhance and refine the functionality in response to feedback from our users.

Simon Ross, Chief Executive at Manchester University Press, explains the significance of the launch below:

‘This is perhaps the most significant event in our 115-year history. We now have all of our academic content in one place: books, journals and collections are hosted in a responsive and easy-to-use environment with a clean and contemporary design. The sites have been designed to enable us to easily update and ensure the integrity of the content and the data that supports it.’

He added:

‘MUP is now a significant Open Access book publisher and we are proud to be able to launch manchesteropenhive at the same time, which includes all our free-to-access content.’

manchesterhive will host our existing eBook collections: Manchester Gothic, Manchester Studies in Imperialism and Manchester Medieval Sources Online, plus two new collections for 2018: Manchester Shakespeare and Manchester Security, Conflict & Peace. It will also host our subscription journal Film Studies, as well as over 1,300 eBook titles, allowing institutional library customers to build their own custom collections to fit their library acquisition plans.

manchesteropenhive will host all our Open Access journals and book titles, enabling quick and easy access to freely available content.